June 20, 2006

Wordplay

I saw the movie Wordplay this afternoon, a documentary about the New York Times crossword, its editor, Will Shortz, and the annual crossword puzzle tournament, which Shortz created and runs. If you like Spellbound, which I really did, you'll like this one. (And if you read Crossworld, a book about crossword puzzle history that I read earlier in the year and had in the sidebar for a while, you'll like Wordplay better than the book, but it does cover a lot of the same material and ideas.)

I did a fair number of crossword puzzles the summer I interned in Washington for Senator Schumer, before my senior year of college. It was what the interns did. We usually had a lull in the mornings, after doing press clippings but before anyone had any work to give us, and we had a pile of newspapers anyway, so a whole bunch of people did the crossword, either from the Times or the Washington Post. Besides that summer, I've never regularly done crossword puzzles. After reading Crossworld, I bought a book of puzzles by Brendan Emmett Quigley, a Times crossword creator who the book spends lots of pages on, and makes him sound pretty cool, and I did a good chunk of the 50 puzzles in the book on subway rides for a while, and enjoyed them. And then I bought a book of Will Shortz's favorite Times puzzles, and haven't done too many of them, because a lot of them are Thursdays and Fridays, and they're too hard for me. I feel like I should be better at crossword puzzles than I am. I can manage a Monday or Tuesday, and make some solid headway on a Wednesday or a Sunday, but the Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays are beyond my crosswording skillz. And I don't think I like them enough to really do them regularly and try to get better. Nevertheless, movies about people doing dorky things, even if they're dorky things I don't love doing, are still pretty cool.

The movie is split into two parts, much like Spellbound -- the "get to know some people" part, and the "big competition" part. In Spellbound, both halves worked really well -- the first half in large part because they're kids, and I found it easy to get sucked in and root for them and identify with some of them, and the second half because a spelling bee has some dramatic tension, even though it's not quite the World Series, and since you've gotten to know the kids in the first half, the second half was pretty compelling. Wordplay had some hurdles to overcome to get to a point where it could be as satisfying as Spellbound. First, the contestants are adults, not kids. And what makes you identify with and root for a 10-year-old who's good at spelling does not really hold when it's a 50-year-old obsessed with doing crossword puzzles. That's not really fair though. I think that was my bias going in, but I'm not sure it held up. Most of the people the movie focuses on were in fact sort of compelling to root for. Certainly the 20-year-old college kid, competing against people two and three times his age, and who came across as a normal, smart, likeable guy. (Who has a blog.) And Will Shortz, who created a major in enigmatology (puzzles) in college, seems like a nice person, although it's hard to see how someone can edit crossword puzzles every day and not get tired of them... then again, it's hard to see how people can do lots of things every day and not get tired of them, and editing crossword puzzles is actually probably near the bottom of the list of things I would hate to have to do every day, so maybe it's perfectly reasonable that he seems to obviously love his job. The segments on crossword puzzle creation are very cool. Anyway, the first half of the movie is really interesting, and it's cool to learn about a bunch of the crossword champions and creators, and there are some cameos from celebrities who do the Times crossword, including Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina, that make the movie pretty neat.

But then there's the competition part. The filmmakers deserve a lot of credit for doing what they could, visually, to make crossword solving engaging to watch. They made it so that we get to see some of the clues, and letters get filled in one at a time, at a speed that lets you solve along with the people doing it for real. Which worked really well, better than it had a right to. And the final puzzle at the tournament is done on easels, in front of an audience, so there's some performance and dramatic tension there. But for the most part, it's a lot of watching people filling in boxes, and I thought the competition part of the film started to drag. Partly because I didn't really care enough about who was going to win, and partly because we weren't getting anything new for a while, and it was the characters we'd already met, filling in boxes and worrying about whether they finished before the next minute had passed.

I'm nitpicking, a bit. Because, overall, the movie worked better than I feared it would, and I found it really watchable and engaging. Even better, it made me want to go buy the New York Times and do the crossword. I didn't, but at least I thought about it. Side note: the movie is kinda like one big advertisement for the New York Times. Lots of stuff about how it's the gold standard of crosswords, the only one people care about, and some talk from Dan Okrent, the former public editor of the Times, and one of the founders of fantasy baseball, not that that's relevant to this, about how the Times is the gold standard of journalism period. Which is probably is. But I started to feel a bit like I was watching Al Gore's movie -- good stuff, but a little bit of that propaganda feeling. Nevertheless, I recommend the movie wholeheartedly. I haven't seen too many better this year.

2 Comments

Spellbound is one of my all-time favorite movies, but I've found it doesn't follow that other related movies are as good. Case in point: Word Wars, which can be found at - http://poll.imdb.com/title/tt0390632/

It's a movie about competitive scrabble players, and it suffered from some of the same problems you identified here (featuring weirdo adults who like scrabble, not being a very performative medium, etc). All in all, I saw it once, watched the whole thing, but wouldn't watch it again . What's funny about the movie is that the thing that annoyed me the most about it (how disagreeable the featured scrabble players were) was also pretty much its saving grace (it was a real freak show).

All that being said, your movie sounds interesting enough. Granted, if they made a new Spellbound for every year of the National Bee, I'd watch it. So, chances are this will be worth seeing, at least as a substitute. Either way, thanks for the recommendation.